chocolate from mary & matt + brooklyn brothers.

I think I’ve figured out the key secrets to making modern-urban-funky chocolatricks. Herein, my thoughts:

1. Helvetica. The international font of modern. Use it everywhere. Use it often.
2. Packaging should include white, the traditional foil, and pink. Not any pink, but acid Barbie doll porno pink. The kind of pink that makes your eyeballs wiggle a little when you look at it.
3. Much like dropping cherry bombs in the toilet or stealing a large diamond from a pedestal in an art gallery, you need to create a diversion. Fool me somehow. If my mind is left to focus on the fact that I’m eating chocolate, I might get fat. Confuse and befuddle me and it’s possible my metabolism will be right behind.

I give you Exhibit A:

Here’s the Chocolate Scrabble bar from New York design team Mary & Matt. Clearly demonstrating all three hallmarks of choco-cool, the best of all is the Scrabble-game diversion. You’ll be so busy thinking up “qu” words that you won’t have time to count calories. Unfortunately, it’s not available on their website as of right now. Either it sold out, or Hasbro (á la Facebook’s Scrabulous) is trying to sue their asses off for daring to tread upon the sanctity of Scrabble™®© without their express permission. It’s a game, not the Qur’an, let’s try and keep that in mind. Also keep in mind the proper and legal trade-marking, registered trade-marking, and copyright I have assigned to the Scrabble™®© name, should anyone from Hasbro see this and have the urge to run me into the poorhouse.

And now, Exhibit B:

Fat Pig Chocolate, created by New York creativos Brooklyn Brothers, features all the hallmarks of cool candy. You’ve got your vagina-pink foil and nifty branding in Helvetica. But, in a surprise twist, rather than divert you from the fact that you’re eating candy, they’ve called a spade a spade. Eat up fatty!

craig kanarick: rock made.

I don’t exactly know what it is about photographing candy that makes me so giddy and excited, it just does. If you’ve got high-res high-art snaps of shellac-covered candies, then I want to buy them. In the same vein as one of my fave Canadian art photographers, Liz Wolfe, comes the purely awesome New York candyfreak Craig Kanarick.

At Rock Made, the site he shares with his wife, artist and author Rebecca Odes, you can check out the full range of his candy close-ups. His intensely zoomed-in photos are beautiful, structural, memory-inducing, and fun. It’s like you can feel the glucose seeping, through osmosis, into your eyeballs. He constructs modern candy landscapes and explores not just the immediate joy created by the candy itself, but (oh….get this) the shapes and colours created by the symmetry and natures of the candies themselves.

I would sell my first born for a series of Craig Kanarick prints. And at prices ranging from $850 to $2500 per print, I’d pretty much have to. I especially would for some of the works from his 2004 series – behold “Green Candies I”, “Purple Candies I”, “Yellow Candies I”, “Red Candies I”, “Blue Candies I”, and, perhaps shockingly, “Orange Candies I”. I love them and I want them and I deserve them. Damn it.

Picture a pure white wall, expansive and architectural and leading to a window, with six of his colour-based candy studies generously leading you into the sunlight…

studio m: happy pills.

Candy is awesome. Drugs are awesome. Candy + Drugs = Mega Awesome.

Um, what I meant to say was Candy is Awesome. Store-bought drugs that are legally sanctioned by the government are awesome. Candy + Tylenol = ….ah, screw it.

Designed in Barcelona by studio m, Happy Pills is a modern day collision between confectionary and apothecary. The store, literally wedged between two large buildings, might go unnoticed if not for the acid-pink Red Cross logo above it’s door. Inside, the pharmaceutical design bend is consistent: jellybean filled pill bottles and fully-stocked “first aid kits” line the shelves, or you can self-medicate by filling up bottles with your candy of choice. My personal fave are the handy “morning-afternoon-night” pill holders, just to make sure your sugar-toothing stays on schedule.

yaya chou: gummi bear bear.

How awesome is this? It’s a big gummi bear…made out of little gummi bears! I love stuff made out of the stuff that it already is.

Bi-coastal artist and animator YaYa Chou lives in both Los Angeles and Taiwan.  The gummi bear sculpture “Simon” debuted in 2006. I’m particularly impressed that, instead of making a living gummi bear out of gummi bears, she made a bear skin rug out of gummi bears. Yaya is really dedicated to this whole candy thing, as evidenced by her gummi bear chandelier:

skittles: “touch”.

Creativity Online recently announced that it’s most-watched TV/Video spot of 2007 was the much buzzed about Skittles “Touch”.

In case you’re not a huge ad nerd like I am, you might not have seen it. And you’d be missing out. So even though this has already been around the web five times, in honour of it’s latest accolade here’s one more posting…

(Agency: TBWA/Chiat/Day – New York)